Act E-Community Model

ACT E-COMMUNITY MODEL

1. Executive summary. Project goals and guidelines

E-communities are not a new idea. People with long traditions of computer networking remember the so-called BBS (Bulletin Board System) communities of the eighties and early nineties.

However, it was not until the online boom of the late nineties that e-communities in the modern sense began to exist. Who has never been to, or never heard about, a website where users log on with a user name and password, in order to access material interesting to themselves and to other like-minded users? Book shoppers go to Amazon.com and receive updates on what their favorite writers are doing, when their next books are coming out, they can view some samples of their latest writing and communicate with other fans through message boards, mailing lists, chat rooms and so on. Fans of electronic music can do exactly the same on the website Clubplanet.com. These are only two examples that we thought of first - practically anyone could give dozens of such examples.

If an e-community is to succeed as a business venture, it would have a huge advantage if there already was a group of people who shared a common interest, who need to be attracted to the website. In other words, first the people and then the website. It would be a big disadvantage for such a website if it had to first attract a group of users onto its content.

Fortunately, the ACT e-community already has a real-life community in place, outside the internet. They are of course all the students, teachers, staff and alumni of the different sections of ACT. The necessity of an online portal for them seems so obvious that it is hard to think of a reason why it doesn't exist yet.

The wonderful thing about an e-community is the huge volume of easy and quick interaction between the users and the makers of the website. They want new content - fine, here is the new content. They want a new design - fine, here is the redesigned website. It would even be extremely easy for the users to become writers, designers and editors on the website.

These two things, plus the thing that the target community has so much in common, guarantees the success of the ACT e-community as an e-business venture.

2. Situation Analysis of the Physical space market

2.1. Local and international market sector trends

E-communities have long since penetrated into the Balkan region, although because the Internet itself has such low penetration here, only a small percentage of the people actually actively belongs to one such community. However, ACT students and staff past and present can not be considered typical Balkan people in terms of Internet usage. Therefore it would be misleading to consider "average" regional trends in this projection.

Internationally speaking, e-communities focusing on a school or some equivalent institution are so successful that any serious analysis can only predict future growth and better integration of such communities.

2.2. Competition

In a certain sense, the ACT e-community does not have a direct rival. The needs which the website will satisfy are now met by other websites and other e-communities, but practically anyone who is or was part of the real-world ACT community still has some ties to it, either through friends, relatives or whatever. Therefore it will be very easy - natural - for such people to "shift" to the future ACT e-community, because of the convenience of being quickly and easily in touch with so many people.

2.3. Brand and product category segmentation, commercialization possibilities, product - service development requirements

In any e-community, everyone is asked to, and in an ideal situation able to, contribute to the best of his abilities. Firstly, since ACT people - past and present can be expected to be curious about the world around them, the website should provide a lot of recent and accurate information. It should have plenty of links to other reliable sources of information (e.g., Wikipedia, the NY Times, BusinessWeek.) Secondly, it should have lots of information about educational opportunities in Europe and America, as well as academic job openings. It should also, just like ACT does for its students, provide services in assisting people to find the right information, the right graduate school, the right grant, the right job. Lastly, the website should provide well-written and informative articles written by community members themselves on their areas of expertise.

All this should be done in a combination of free content available and interesting to all, and paid (like on a subscription basis, for example) content for people interested in a specific topic in detail.

2.4. Company philosophy and overall assessment of project adoption

ACT is a non-profit institution so there should be no aggressive advertising, and no insistence on paid content, beyond covering the costs of running the website itself. After a few months of running online, when there are accurate statistics regarding the number of regular community members, it should not be difficult to attract advertisers, either through banner ads or pop-up windows. (Pop-ups are a more 'convenient' solution, since it is easy to block them from any modern browser like Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox. Banners are more difficult to block or ignore.)

3. Cyberspace Situation Analysis

As we previously stated, because of its nature, the ACT e-community does not have a direct competitor. However, its (future) members are probably active members of other online communities, and some kind of differentiation is needed to attract their attention away from their current communities and into the new one. Whether this will be achieved through quality content, many quick daily updates, a sense of humor throughout the website content, or other means - time will show. The wishes of the community members will direct the content and the 'tone' of the website which hosts it. However, the ultimate, greatest strength of the website should be its convenience. This can be easily achieved through a combination of backgrounds of the people who run it. There should be some current graduate, college and high school students, because they know best what other students want to see on the website and how they will want it to look. There should also, of course, be some teachers, some staff and some alumni, for exactly the same reason. A combination of all these